No Horsing Around For Early Painters

Careful who you call primitive: cave dwellers, it now emerges, were better at drawing animals than many of their highly trainer latter-day successors.

Hungarian researchers analyzed 1,000 images of four-legged animals and found the surprising result that the cave artists were far more accurate at portraying the animals’ much-misunderstood gait. Before the work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who published his classic “Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements” in 1887, modern-era artists got the gait wrong a remarkable 83.5% of the time, the scientists found. Post-Muybridge, the error rate fell to 58%.

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